On Christmas Day 1975, Marcia Marie Summers was born to Charlene
Summers, a member and resident of the Standing Rock Sioux Nation in
North Dakota. A few months later, a white couple from Indiana
approached the young mother and offered to care for her infant
while Summers attended school. (Just two months before, the couple
had filed an adoption petition in the Standing Rock Tribal Court
for another Indian child, but the court had denied their request.)
Assuming she was making a temporary arrangement, Summers agreed and
signed a document giving the Indiana couple power of attorney over
Marcia Marie in parent-child-related actions. Immediately, the
couple departed with the baby from the reservation and returned to
Indiana. Summers realized that the couple intended to permanently
adopt her daughter, so she asked the Standing Rock Tribal Court to
intervene. When the couple ignored the tribal court's order to
return the child to her mother, Summers and tribal authorities
requested the help of the Association on American Indian Affairs
(AAIA). Their attorney filed a writ of habeas corpus
on Summers's behalf in the Washington County, Indiana, Circuit
Court, and the judge ordered Marcia Marie returned to her mother,
noting the tribe's exclusive jurisdiction in the case.

Like Summers, in the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of other
American Indian parents, grandparents, and caretakers suffered the
removal of their children and their placement in non-Indian foster
or adoptive homes. Unlike Summers, however, many Indian families
struggled for years to regain their children, and some were never
able to effect their return. By the late 1960s, many Indian tribes
had become deeply troubled by this practice. In 1968, having
endured an inordinate number of such cases, the Devils Lake (now
Spirit Lake) Sioux Tribe of North Dakota requested that the
AAIA conduct an investigation into the practice. The
AAIA found that of 1,100 Devils Lake Sioux Indians
under twenty-one years of age living on the Fort Totten
reservation, 275, or 25 percent, had been separated from their
families. Suspecting that this practice devastated other Indian
communities as well, the AAIA engaged in a
painstaking process to amass similar data from state social
services agencies and private placement agencies across the nation.
They discovered that in most states with large American Indian
populations, 25 to 35 percent of Indian children had been separated
from their families and placed in foster or adoptive homes or in
institutions at a per capita rate far higher than that of
non-Indian children.

How did it come to pass that the fostering and adoption of
Indian children outside their families and communities had reached
these crisis proportions by the late 1960s? State welfare
authorities and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA)
officials alleged a dramatic rise in unmarried Indian mothers with
unwanted children and claimed that many Indian individuals and
families lacked the resources and skills to properly care for their
own children. Claiming to be concerned with the best interests of
the Indian child, the BIA promoted the increased
fostering and adoption of Indian children in non-Indian families.
Indian families and their advocates charged instead that many
social workers were using ethnocentric and middle-class criteria to
unnecessarily remove Indian children from their families and
communities. Through creating their own child welfare organizations
and legal codes, as well as working for the Indian Child Welfare
Act (ICWA), Indian activists and their allies sought
to bring Indian child welfare under the control of Indian
nations.

Given the shockingly high estimates of Indian children who were
fostered or adopted outside their communities, surprisingly little
historical research has been done on this topic. Most of the
scholarship on Indian adoption has been in the fields of sociology,
psychology, social work, and law. It has included outcomes studies
and oral histories of adopted Indian children, debates about social
work practice, and examinations of the new legal framework created
by the passage of ICWA in 1978. Historians of
American adoption have briefly mentioned Indian adoption, but they
have generally subsumed it under their larger narratives about
transracial adoption in the late twentieth century. Scholars of
American Indian history, however, have not addressed this topic to
any...

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